I haven’t spent a whole lot of time with the Nintendo Wii, but I suspect I’d like it. That out of the way, I think the best video game system of all time was probably the Super Nintendo. Or maybe I had one at a time I was really impressionable and thus everything else sucks. It’s hard to be totally objective on this.

I still play Super Nintendo, but not as a console. I play the games in an emulator on my iMac. The emulator is called SNES9x and can be downloaded for free here for the Mac. It’s also available for Windows and Linux (32 bit, 64 bit). Here’s the main page. Download links are in the upper right corner.

Now, one of the requirements for fun gameplay is to have a controller you hold in your hand. Playing Super Mario with a Keyboard is a lot like listening to the elevator music version of Light My Fire. Here’s what I use:

It had the buttons in all the right places and the price was right. Actually, I bought on impulse, before I had the emulator or games. I figured if the controller existed, the games almost had to. Turns out I was right. But, good as that controller is, I sort of want it to break so I can justify getting a couple of these instead:

The last thing you’ve gotta have is games. When I want a game, I generally just do a Google search for [name of game] snes rom and see where that takes me. I found this site, though, and it’s got the most popular games right at the top, which suits me just fine since the most popular games generally have Mario in the title; as we all know, Mario games are the best.

What this means in practical terms is this: I get to watch Dream Theater’s live DVDs, play Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island, keep my eye on Twitter, the instant messenger, and write articles like this all on one display. God, I miss my second monitor.

Once you’ve got the emulator, some games, and a controller or two, it behaves exactly as you’d expect. It’s almost boring how precisely old-school normal it feels. I like turning the emulator’s music off and rocking to whatever it is I like rocking to because that’s way better the beep-bop-boop SNES music.